El Cuaderno del Teniente
by FloatingPizza
Summary: Lieutenant Lesaro's meditations on life, death, and spirituality, written by a spectral hand on a ghost ship sailing through purgatory. Intermittent timeline, takes place before and during Dead Men Tell No Tales. Not strictly canon.
1. Centrado

When I was yet young, I thought the cathedral of Sevilla, the city of my birth, to be the most beautiful creation of man upon the Earth. The grand solemnity of stone, the graceful arcing flow of her lines, the radiant glory of the _vidrio de colores_ , the deep silence of the evening after Mass, the holy profundity of expanse. There was the sighing music of organs, most holy and chilling instruments that breathed like living things, and the joy of voices raised together in praise, balanced against the deep intonation of the _Padre_. Scents of warmth, of wax, of stone and the dust of many feet. The sea breeze sighing through the sun-warmed courtyards. Kneeling in the sanctuary, knowing humility, learning patience - one sensed and more than sensed the omnipotence of the Spirit there.

But now, in place of arching marble heights I behold these tattered sails, and in place of a spire reaching to the blue glory of the firmament I behold a splintered mast, almost lost in the constant fog. Instead of the reassurance of warmth, the pain of burning. Ashes of flesh, not of palm. In place of holy chanting, the vacant cry of long-dead seabirds, a futile calling from empty throats and disintegrated form. My mind and soul reels from what lies before my eyes, from what has befallen our captain, our crew, our ship, my body, and still greater fear fills me, that the corruption goes deeper than the flesh, unto a decay of the soul and damnation.

But still I remember the cathedral, her sense of eternal peace. Still I remember the grace of the Latin echoing through the columns, grace in form and message. I remember and I pray and I entreat that the prayer will be heard through the smoke and ruin of our sin, that we are not yet cast out beyond recall, in this realm of haze and agony somewhere past the border of life.

* * *

 _Cover image: Caspar David Friedrich's_ Das Eismeer, _edited for atmosphere._


	2. Salida

No man living knew the nature of purgatory, nor of its sure existence, nor of the soul's path after death. I supposed then that we had found it, that we were sailing in the wake of all souls, though I confess it was eerie and uncanny enough, and every hour I fought rising dread with the meditations of the stoic.

In this trade of ours, a man grows accustomed to the sight of the bloodied wreckage of a ruined body, the garish ruins of what remains when the soul has fled. Such things are ugly enough. It is something else entirely, though, to behold those same heinous pieces assembled into a facsimile of motion, of movement without bone and muscle. Then one knows the horror of violence afresh and recognizes with horror oneself as an equal abomination.


	3. Despertamiento

I spent many days and night considering the state of our souls - our salvation - after our second awakening unto death. We existed in some strange plane of dulled, disembodied pain and numbly hysteric disbelief, brought about when one of us had the absence of mind to dwell on what had happened to us all, that which should never happen to a man or any living thing - to exist beyond its calling. All too often I passed young men, once whole, whose faces gaped in an unreal hollowness, eyelids burned, sockets vacant, jaws unhinged for loss of tendons or loss of sanity into terrible silent screams.

But our existence is merely that, an existence, and a man's - a creature's - sheer existence, its embodied state of being, is hardly sin. An act to extend that futile existence is, perhaps, a transgression, but penance can be paid for acts, and prayers spoken, intercession granted.

Eventually I became reconciled enough with this strange place we found ourselves, this strange state we have found ourselves in - what choice did I have? - and watched the bones shifting beneath the cracks of my charred skin with something approaching wonder. How is it that the dead yet live and the mind yet ponders, tethered to this shattered form?

The Lord once called to life dry bones in the desert. May he do the same with cursed sailors trapped in the uneasy tides of an eternal twilight.


End file.
